2. "Logical Illogicality"

As Russia absorbed the major blows of Nazi force, Stalin became an ally, the admired "Uncle Joe"; but with ambivalence. Roosevelt's wartime strategy, he confided to his son in private, was for the US to be the "reserves," waiting for the Russians to exhaust themselves in the combat against the Nazis, after which the Americans would move in for the kill. One of the preeminent Roosevelt scholars, Warren Kimball, concludes that "aid to the Soviet Union became a presidential priority" on the assumption that Red Army victories would allow the President to keep US soldiers out of a land war in Europe. Truman went much further. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, he commented that "If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible." By 1943, the US began to reinstate Fascist collaborators and sympathizers in Italy, a pattern that extended through the world as territories were liberated, reinstating the tolerance for fascism as a barrier to radical social change. Recall that Soviet aggression was not an issue prewar, nor anticipated postwar.⁵

The problem of the enormous rotten apple led to some odd contortions in policymaking. In an important study of July 1945, transmitted by Secretary of War Stimson to the Secretary of State, military planners tried to put a satisfactory gloss on the US intention to take control of the world and surround Russia with military force, while denying the adversary any rights beyond its borders. "To argue that it is necessary to preserve a unilateral military control by the U.S. or Britain over Panama or Gibraltar and yet deny a similar control to Russia at the Dardanelles may seem open to the criticism of being illogical," they worried, particularly since the Dardanelles provided Russia with its only warm water access and was, in fact, to be kept firmly under unilateral US-British control. But the criticism is only superficially plausible, the planners concluded: the US design is "a logical illogicality." By no "stretch of the imagination" could the US and Britain be thought to have "expansionist or aggressive ambition." But Russia

has not as yet proven that she is entirely without expansionist ambitions... She is inextricably, almost mystically, related to the ideology of Communism which superficially at least can be associated with a rising tide all over the world wherein the common man aspires to higher and wider horizons. Russia must be sorely tempted to combine her strength with her ideology to expand her influence over the earth. Her actions in the past few years give us no assured bases for supposing she has not flirted with the thought.

In short, the burden is upon the Russians to prove that they have no intention of associating with the rascal multitude who "aspire to higher and wider horizons," with the "poor who have always wanted to plunder the rich" (Dulles). Until they do so convincingly, it is only logical for responsible men who do not consort with criminal elements bent on plunder, and flirt with no such subversive thoughts as higher aspirations, to establish their unilateral control over the world. Russia must demonstrate that it is not a potential threat to "the very survival of the capitalist order" (Gaddis). Once it has clearly accepted the principle that Churchill's rich men must have their way everywhere, it may be allowed to enter the servants' quarters.

The notion of "logical illogicality" is another useful tool in the ideological kit, which merits wider use.

The severity of the danger had been underscored a month earlier by William Donovan, director of the OSS (the precursor of the CIA). In a Europe "racked by war and suffering widespread misery," he warned, the Soviets have "a strong drawing card in the proletarian philosophy of Communism." The US and its allies have "no political or social philosophy equally dynamic or alluring." As noted, the same problem was deplored by Eisenhower and Dulles ten years later, and regularly by the US in Indochina.⁶

The reasoning outlined in 1945 prevailed throughout the Cold War period, and follows naturally from the general logic of the North-South conflict. The same reasoning has often been applied at home, for example, after World War I, when "there could be no nice distinctions drawn between the theoretical ideals of the radicals and their actual violations of our national laws" and "no time to waste on hairsplitting over infringement of liberty" (Attorney-General Palmer and the Washington Post, during Wilson's Red Scare). The same doctrine was invoked to justify the bombing of Libyan cities in 1986 in "self-defense against future attack," as the government announced to much acclaim among devoted advocates of international law.⁷

"Clear and present dangers" cannot be tolerated, however clouded the clarity and remote the present.

The logic is simple: the rich men rule by right the world they own, and cannot be expected to tolerate potential criminal action that might interfere with "stability." The threat has to be cut off at the pass. And if it takes form, we are entitled to do what we must to set things right.

It was not Stalin's crimes that troubled Western leaders. Truman noted in his diary, "I can deal with Stalin," who is "honest -- but smart as hell." Others agreed, among them Eisenhower, Leahy, Harriman, and Byrnes. What went on in Russia was not his concern, Truman declared. Stalin's death would be a "real catastrophe," he felt. But cooperation was contingent on the US getting its way 85 percent of the time, Truman made clear. Melvyn Leffler -- who has examined the record in close detail and has much respect for the achievements and foresight of the early postwar leadership -- remarks that "Truman liked" Stalin. He comments on the lack of any "sense of real compassion and/or moral fervor" in the documentary record. "These men were concerned primarily with power and self-interest, not with real people facing real problems in the world that had just gone through fifteen years of economic strife, Stalinist terror, and Nazi genocide."⁸

The animating concern was not Stalin's awesome crimes, but the apparent successes in development with their broad appeal, and the possibility that the Russians might be "flirting with the thought" of lending support to "aspirations of the common man" in the West, and subjugated and oppressed people everywhere. The failure of East Europe to resume its traditional role as a supplier of food and raw materials to the West compounded these concerns. The problem is not crimes, but insubordination, a fact illustrated by a host of gangsters from Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin to Saddam Hussein.

⁵ DD, ch. 11. FDR, Zeman, Communist Europe, 172n.; Kimball, Juggler, 34. Truman, Garthoff, Détente, 6, citing NYT, June 24, 1941.

⁶ Leffler, Preponderance, 78; Indochina, see RC.

⁷ NI, 185f., on the Red Scare; 272f. on Libya, and P&E, ch. 3.

⁸ Leffler, Preponderance, 58-9, 15.